So much for "The Big Lebowski" and Robert Altman

The Big Lebowski was shunned by critics after its release, this one is catching its own heat(Although has an 80+ on Metascore), its a very solid film and will always be a great collection to PTAs catalog. I'm in the "I loved it" crowd, kinda for reasons you mentioned... But its dropping in ratings weekly. Its better than a 6.8, thats utter BS

I stand by it being The Long Goodbye with shades of Lebowski. Sure it's its own thing, but the Altman comparisons are totally valid in my opinion.

I think those comparisons make sense because together they start to form a pretty coherent subgenre of noir, I mean noir films that capitalize on some noir expectations while subverting others by altering tone, introducing humor, and substituting a somewhat incompetent hero for the expected hardboiled detective. There are a lot of outright parodies of noir and detective noir films, but I think the three films mentioned in your OP are ones that use a satirical formula to tell a good and humane story.

I remember being disappointed by Big Lebowski the first time I saw it. That was coming off of Fargo (and all the other great, early Coen bros films), so ti didn't seem to fit in. Now I love Lebowski like every good person should.

Hopefully Inherent Vice is similar. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe when I'm not trying to figure out what's going on with the plot, I'll be able to sit back and enjoy the performances, visuals, ect. It's definitely a great looking film. But at 2.5 hours, it's really long for this type of plot.

At least I know I need to watch it again, there's a lot going on. I just hope it all adds up to something bigger than the sum of the parts.

The reason I compare it with The Big Lebowski is because you watch it once and you're like "eh', but then you watch it again, and again, you think you're doing it to understand the complex plot more, but you're really doing it because it gets better every time, you notice new things each time, and after enough viewings you see the masterpiece.

This movie wanted to be a good one (especially in the second half), but for whatever reason the director seemed unable to pull it off.

There was so much wrong with this movie I am not entirely sure where to begin. Suffice to say that it is underwhelming, especially for an Anderson film.

It tried to have interesting dialogue, it tried to have interesting characters, it tried to have a good story. It failed in all these regards.

It didn't try hard enough to make us care about the occurrences, and it seemed to hope that we would care about the narrative from the moment the film begins, instead of gradually building for us this world and then unfolding carefully into the plot (you know, like most movies do).

Another problem is that the film felt far too structural and organized and stiff, almost like it would make for a better stageplay. Even the actors' performances (whether they were good or not) often felt uninspired, disjointed, and lingering in the balance of cinematic purgatory. Adding insult to this injury is the long extended scenes of dialog and character interaction reminiscent of something one would find in a Tarantino or Scorsese film, as if this movie had a story actually engaging enough to make us appreciate such scenes.

The voiceover narration weakly added very little clarity to the tale. The story felt hardly focused and was the opposite of concise and cohesive, so much that it makes L.A. Confidential look like kindergarteners' reader-friendly material.

The film probably should have realized itself as a comedy more smoothly from the beginning than seeming like some sort of uneven mishmash that feels as though it hastily bypassed the (imperatively) nurturing qualities of the pre-production phase. Even the humor attempts felt poorly executed most of the time. The middle-fingers, the awkward looks, the licking of popsicles, etc.


I want to see Anderson make another damn-good film as much as your average Anderson fan. However, I am not so in love that I fail to see how this movie wanted to be an Anderson film more than it actually pulled off being an Anderson film. What a waste for one of this generation's greatest directors...


Don't be fooled by the terrific set design and fantastic cinematography (symmetrically screaming "Kubrick!" at us in several shots). Something went wrong with the fruition of this one; perhaps a classic case of style over material, something I never thought I'd accuse PTA of.




I'm not a control freak, I just like things my way

The reason for the comparisons is because all three films are revisionist/"neo-" noir. Each of them is working on the tropes of the noir genre, shifting the time period and asking "what if?" in relation to the new setting and revised Hard Boiled detective. In the case of the movies you mentioned, for example, IV shares, in addition to a number of similar plot-twists, a time period with TLG and a stoner protagonist with TBL.

Dangerous territory, I think, remixing an already well-mined genre and doing so with a mumbly, off-hand treatment of all the major plot points. I'm not a Pynchon fan, so I can't speak to the adaptation, but I didn't see much new or exciting in the scenario. Perhaps Pynchon was working on Chandler in a way I didn't catch or that didn't translate into the script, which, of course, has its own slew of filmic sources to engage with.

What I did like, fwiw, is the way PTAs camera and editing matched Doc's point of view, from straight to hung over to stoned to gassed to up up up on that bottle of white. As an exercise in pov, I like the film quite a bit, but it would have helped if the POV felt a little less wrote, a little more fresh.

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